For UK founders weighing how to reward long serving staff without forcing a sale or an IPO, Moneybox has just supplied a fresh data point, and a useful one, because it is the first British fintech to put real numbers behind the answer.

Haatch Ventures has closed its fourteenth Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme fund after hitting its £4.5 million hard cap, the pre-seed B2B SaaS investor told backers on 11 July, two days after flagging that only £500,000 of headroom remained in a raise it runs partly through Crowdcube.

Structured products are a mainstay of Asian wealth portfolios, and HSBC is one of the region's largest issuers of them. That makes the efficiency case unusually strong. Popular products such as autocallables and equity linked notes have busy lifecycles, with observation dates, coupon triggers and early redemption events that are currently tracked and reconciled separately by the issuer, paying agents and distributors. A digitally native note makes the token itself the single

A plain English guide for founders and investors. Part of our intelligence series on equity tokenisation in the UK.

A founder in Britain in 2026 can do almost everything right and still end up in someone else's market. She can spin tech out of a UK university, raise a seed round from UK angels, hire her first team in Leeds or Bristol or Oxford, and prove that the thing works. She can scale the business to unprecedented heights - well almost - and then! At the precise moment the company is ready to grow into something durable, she will find that the money to do that is not here. It is

Picture two founders raising a seed round in the same week. One has built and sold a company before, has a network of investors who already know the name, and has funds competing to lead. The other has an equally good product, early revenue and a sharper insight, but no track record and no warm rout

Equity crowdfunding made a simple promise: ordinary people could back a young company early, alongside the founders, and share in what it became. Monzo is the poster child. One early round filled in 96 seconds. In December 2018 the bank raised about £20m from roughly 36,000 people. Buying in was effortless, a few taps in an app. Getting out is the part nobody designed for. Most crowd investors do not sit directly on a company's share register. They invest through a nomi

For years the frustration voiced by British founders and the people who build alongside them has been the same. You can grow a company worth billions in London and still find that nobody who helped create that value can realise any of it, short of selling to an overseas buyer or waiting out an IPO t

For more than a decade the same story has played out at the top of Europe's startup ladder. A company built in London, Paris or Stockholm reaches the stage where it needs hundreds of millions to scale, cannot find a cheque that size at home, and takes one from a United States fund instead, often shi

The money lands at the scaling stage, where British companies have long struggled to find patient equity at home.

A research note published this week by Binance Research puts a number on something the tokenisation sector has been circling for two years. It argues that crypto exchanges could route around US$2 trillion of new capital and close to 300 million new investors into global equity markets by 2031, with

Picture an angel who backed a Leeds founder's seed round eighteen months ago. The company is growing, a later investor has offered to buy some of the angel's shares, and the angel would like to take a little money off the table. There is a worry in the room. Those shares carry SEIS relief, and SEIS comes with a three year holding rule. Does selling now blow up the tax benefit? For a long time this question got waved away as too complicated, or treated as a genuine unknown

The venture capital industry runs on reputation. Relationships are currency. Warm introductions open doors that cold calls cannot. And dissent about how the system works can be career-limiting in an industry small enough for word to travel fast.

For those watching institutional asset management move onchain, the partnership announced on 12 May 2026 between Payward and Franklin Templeton carries weight that goes beyond a standard industry announcement. This is a $1.6 trillion global asset manager with a ten-year head start in tokenised finan

Only around 14% of UK angel investors are women. That figure has not shifted meaningfully in years, and it matters because the composition of the investor base directly shapes who gets funded. Female angel investors are significantly more likely to deploy capital into female-founded businesses. If t

On 6 May 2026, Chainlink, Apex Group, Bluprynt and Hacken announced the successful completion of the Bermuda Monetary Authority's Embedded Supervision Solution. The pilot demonstrated, for the first time at live scale, that regulatory compliance rules can be built directly into digital asset transac

The numbers are in for Q1 2026, and the headline story is straightforward: UK equity investment is holding steady at roughly £6 billion per quarter, the UK remains Europe's dominant destination for venture capital, and the market is, on the surface, healthy.

On 8 May 2026, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook delivered a speech at the Central Bank of West African States conference in Dakar, Senegal, that covered tokenisation in terms usually reserved for established financial market infrastructure. She confirmed that tokenised assets in the United States

The Arrangement OKX — one of the world's largest crypto exchanges by derivatives volume — has integrated BlackRock's BUIDL fund as eligible margin collateral for institutional clients. Standard Chartered acts as custodian. This is the first time a globally systemically important bank (G-SIB) has served in a custodial role in an arrangement of this kind.

Tradeweb's Q1 2026 earnings call, held on 29 April, marks a different kind of moment. The platform reported $10 million in quarterly revenue directly attributed to commercial activity on the Canton Network — the distributed ledger infrastructure purpose-built for institutional digital asset deployment. That is not a pilot. That is a revenue line. What Tradeweb Reported Tradeweb Markets, which operates one of the world's largest electronic fixed income and derivatives tr